Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §7.2
ion rather than simply execution. As it is, Tacitus clearly regarded 'Christ' as a
proper name, whose followers were known as Christiani. 4
Suetonius, also writing early in the second century, makes a similar but
confused reference to an episode in 49 CE. 'Since the Jews were constantly causing
disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [Claudius] expelled them from
Rome' (Claudius 25.4). Most infer that Suetonius misheard the name (the pronunciation
of Christus and Chrestus would have been very similar) and misunderstood
the report as a reference to someone (Chrestus) active in the Jewish
community at the time. The broad consensus is that the disturbances referred to
had been occasioned by some strong reactions within certain synagogues to Jewish
merchants and visitors preaching about Jesus as the Christ. The confusion involved
is hardly the work of artifice or contrivance, but certainly weakens the
historical value of the text.
Of the possible references to Jesus in Jewish rabbinic sources, the most
plausible echo of early pre-rabbinic (Pharisaic) reaction to Jesus is b. Sanhedrin
43a, referring to Yeshu (Jesus) who was hanged on the eve of Passover and describing
him as a magician who beguiled Israel and led it astray. But the whole
enterprise of reading first-century details from often much later rabbinic traditions
is too fraught with difficulty for us to put too much weight on them. 5
Such references are important if only because about once every generation
someone reruns the thesis that Jesus never existed and that the Jesus tradition is a
wholesale invention. 6 But they provide very little hard information and it will
suffice to refer to them at the two or three relevant points in what follows.
7.2. The Earliest References to Jesus
In view of some continuing uncertainty as to the sources used by Josephus and
Tacitus it is probably worth simply recording the earliest references to Jesus as a
historical personage. They come from Paul's letters, the earliest Christian documentation
which has come down to us.
The first is 1 Cor. 15.3 where Paul recites the foundational belief which he
himself had received and which was evidently taught to converts as the earliest
Christian catechetical instruction: 'that Christ died . . .'. The point is that Paul
4. On the other hand, we can hardly be entirely confident that Tacitus had access to official
records (Van Voorst, Jesus 49-52).
5. See further J. Maier, Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischen Überlieferung
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978); Van Voorst, Jesus 104-29.
6. Most recently G. A. Wells has continued a long-running but lone campaign in The Jesus
Myth (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). For earlier treatments in the same vein see Weaver, Historical
Jesus ch. 2.
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